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TalkingNutrition in 2013: How Did We Do?

By Julia Bird

2013 was a great year for TalkingNutrition! Our main aim is to provide a source of relevant and timely information about recent nutrition research findings. We respond, often within hours of publication, with useful and referenced information written by nutrition scientists to place nutrition science in the context of a healthy diet. In the course of the year, we switched web content platforms to expand our social media capabilities and we hope to continue these improvements in 2014.

We saw an increase in the number of visits compared to 2012: we now have an average of around 50 visitors a day and have logged a little over 19,500 visitors since the start of the year. We have visitors from 132 different countries and the top five countries are the US, the UK, India, Canada and the Netherlands. Around one third of our visitors have a direct link to our site, 7% are referred to via Twitter and 2% from Facebook, with the rest from search engines or links from other sites. Our most popular posts were about vitamin B12, clearly an interesting area of research for our readers at the moment.

Over the course of 2013 we almost doubled our number of Twitter followers. We had around 1500 at the start of the year, and at the time of writing, we are 24 followers shy of 3000. We have also seen an increase in our interactions with other followers using Twitter and we have enjoyed being able to respond to questions that have come through this year. Our most popular tweet was actually a retweet from @benatipsosmori about the economic center of the planet, which had 14 retweets and was marked as a favorite by 3 followers. TalkingNutrition’s presence at the Homocysteine and One-Carbon Metabolism Conference in Dublin in September allowed some to experience the conference highlights from afar, and our #2 and #3 tweets contained snippets from two B-vitamin researchers who were presenting, Professor Stover and Professor Reynolds, with 8 and 7 retweets. Dr Manfred Eggersdorfer’s post on the role of nutrition in improving the lives of millions of people around the world also was widely shared among social media and was a top tweet via our account. Our top hashtags reflect our content: #nutrition, #vitaminsinmotion, #vitamind, #malnutrition and #100yearsofvitamins. We are happy to have been able to promote the work of many NGOs that are active in the nutrition area including the World Food Programme, UNICEF, Helen Keller International, Vitamin Angels, Thousand Days, the Micronutrient Initiative and the GAIN alliance via Twitter.

Michael and I would like to thank all our readers and followers for a great year. We enjoy bringing people the latest nutrition science news and are glad that our readers have found value in our work. Have a great festive season!

Sources:

Information on our top tweets was from www.mytoptweet.com and hashtag analytics from Twitonomy. We used Webtrends to analyze our blog posts and site traffic.